JFK's Forgotten Dallas Motorcade: The Unseen Film and Photos

Campaign ’60

The candidate and his running mate made a two-day dash through Texas that would test the new parameters of the Kennedy-Johnson relationship.

By Alan Peppard
Staff Writer

About this story

The Film

John F. Kennedy never made it to his Dallas speech on November 22, 1963. But eight weeks before the 1960 election, he made two Dallas speeches. A newly discovered color film of his Sept. 13, 1960, appearance with Lyndon Johnson at Dallas’ Chance Vought Aircraft factory is perhaps the only complete film of a JFK speech in Dallas. We present it for its first showing in 53 years.

The Photos

From Kennedy and Johnson’s morning arrival at Meacham Field in Fort Worth through a festive Dallas motorcade and their afternoon departure from Love Field, Dallas Morning News photographer Clint Grant was there, shooting continuously. Now digitally restored, these pictures are revealed for the first time since they were developed and then stored in 1960.

John F. Kennedy was just days from securing the 1960 Democratic nomination for president when Dr. W.A. Criswell strode, bible in hand, to the carved wooden altar of the mighty First Baptist Church in Dallas.

Chopping the July air with disdain, he prophesied that the election of the Catholic Kennedy would “spell the death of a free church in a free state.”

The following week, when Kennedy was nominated on the first ballot, it came with an added sting for Criswell and other conservative Texans: Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, a son of the Hill Country, joined the ticket in the No. 2 spot.

Dallas Rep. Bruce Alger, Texas’ lone Republican in Congress, called it a capitulation “to radical forces of the East and North.”

With its own particular brew of affluence, fundamentalism and inflexibility, Dallas was never seriously in play in 1960.

But Texas’ 24 electoral votes were a weight-bearing beam that held up the Kennedy electoral strategy.

Kennedy “was a pragmatist,” recalled Massachusetts congressman and future House Speaker Tip O’Neill. “If he had Lyndon, he had Texas, and if he had Texas he could win several other Southern states. Without Lyndon on the ticket, the Democrats would have lost.”

So, after the Labor Day kickoff of the national campaign against GOP nominee Richard Nixon, Kennedy was aboard his private plane flying toward a rendezvous with his running mate. They would make a two-day dash through Texas that would test the new parameters of the Kennedy-Johnson relationship.

The Lone Star interlude began near midnight on Sept. 11, 1960, with a scotch-fueled Johnson berating Kennedy staffers in El Paso. It concluded on Sept. 13, 1960, with an unexpected triumph in the citadel of the American right wing: downtown Dallas.

With each passing year, increasing nuance is revealed about the JFK presidency. But in the shorthand of a nation’s memory, his assassination in 1963 was the first domino that tipped the others — Vietnam, Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy and Watergate.

Knowing what the next decade would bring, John F. Kennedy’s 1960 trip to Dallas seems like a vignette from romantic fiction.

He arrived to deliver his lunchtime speech. The open car carried him safely to Love Field. There, he boarded his plane for a midday liftoff into an innocent Texas sky.

After an address on religion the previous night in Houston, the candidate is greeted with Baptist for Kennedy signs in Fort Worth.

Grabbing the Houston Gauntlet

Criswell’s July 3 sermon had been the Protestant clergy’s warning shot. Dr. Norman Vincent Peale and Dr. Daniel Poling, editor of the Christian Herald, began the real barrage in early September, charging that the Vatican would trump the Constitution in a Kennedy White House.

“I’m getting tired of these people who think I want to replace the gold at Fort Knox with a supply of holy water”

— John F. Kennedy, on the role Catholicism would play in his presidency

“I’m getting tired of these people who think I want to replace the gold at Fort Knox with a supply of holy water,” JFK snapped privately.

In Texas, members of the Greater Houston Ministerial Association joined the offensive by pressing Kennedy to address their group.

“They’re mostly Republicans, and they’re out to get you,” warned Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn, a Hard Shell Baptist from Bonham, northeast of Dallas.

He knew that the evangelicals who dominated Texas were vigilant against what they saw as the two great conspiracies for world domination — communism and Catholicism. Kennedy’s brass-knuckle aide Kenny O’Donnell agreed: “If you have to meet the religious issue, Houston is not the place to do it.”

But the candidate smelled an opportunity. “Tell them I’m going to do it,” JFK responded.

A wounded LBJ lashes out

On Sunday, Sept. 11, aboard the airplane named for his daughter, Caroline, Kennedy rested his voice, which was strained from the week’s campaigning. Scribbling on a legal pad, he passed occasional notes to his traveling inner circle as the prodigious emptiness of southern New Mexico stretched out in the darkness below.

Pilots Howard Baird and Ronald Dumais, both veteran World War II aviators, could see the lights of El Paso and Juarez beckon from below the ridge of the Franklin Mountains. Somewhere in those lights, Lyndon Johnson had another Cutty Sark.

“Johnson was just up all night lapping up the booze. This was the first really bad episode that set the pattern that became fairly common during the campaign, of very, very heavy drinking.”

— George Reedy, Johnson press aide

“[Johnson] was just up all night lapping up the booze,” recalled his press aide George Reedy. “[This] was the first really bad episode that set the pattern that became fairly common during the campaign, of very, very heavy drinking.”

What had set Johnson off was an El Paso newspaper quote from a Kennedy advance man saying, “Kennedy is more popular down here than Johnson and he needs us in Texas more than we need him.”

When the Caroline parked, “the most outraged Lyndon Johnson I’ve ever seen in my life got on the plane,” O’Donnell recalled.

In town at the Hotel Cortez, the drinking and complaining lasted deep into the night. “[Johnson] practically had to be steered around,” recalled Reedy. “I remember Jack asking, ‘Are you sure you’re going to be all right, Lyndon?’”

But the tantrum burned off with the sunrise on Monday, Sept. 12, and the blur of speeches and handshakes in Lubbock and San Antonio. That afternoon, Kennedy and Johnson spoke at the Alamo.

Meanwhile, in Dallas, Barefoot Sanders, local campaign director for Kennedy-Johnson, prepped for their arrival by assessing the competition. Standing on Main Street, he watched Richard Nixon and his parade led by the Kilgore Rangerettes.

Of the approximately $6,000 local Democrats had raised to finance the JFK parade and rally, Sanders had paid $800 to the same Rangerettes to lead Kennedy the following day down the same street to the same auditorium.

In Fort Worth, Judge Sarah T. Hughes sits between JFK and LBJ. Three years later, she would give the oath of office to Lyndon Johnson at Love Field.

‘Tomorrow, it may be you’

On Monday evening, in a ballroom at Houston’s Rice Hotel, JFK gave a 15-minute opening statement, widely considered to be the best speech of the campaign, to an initially stony audience of Protestant ministers.

In spare prose, he referred to “the so-called religious issue.” The real issues, he said, were hungry children in West Virginia and old people who could not pay their medical bills — “an America with too many slums, with too few schools, and too late to the moon. They are not religious issues, for war and hunger and ignorance and despair know no religious barriers.”

Inoculating himself against an expected volley of hostile questions, he made a powerful allusion to totalitarian oppression.

“For while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been, and may someday be again, a Jew or a Quaker or a Unitarian or a Baptist. … Today I may be the victim, but tomorrow, it may be you.”

While it did not placate everyone (“The more I listen to him, the more I ‘Ha, ha!’” Criswell responded), it did quarantine the religious issue as a hobbyhorse for extremists.

“The success of his appearance at Houston boosted his stock considerably among such previously doubtful Democratic leaders as Rayburn and Price Daniel, the Texas governor,” O’Donnell would write.

Kennedy and Johnson greet Edna Willy, widow of Navy Lt. Wilford John Willy. Willy and JFK’s older brother, Joe Jr., died when their plane exploded during a secret WWII mission.

The Fort Worth Widow

On the morning of Tuesday, Sept. 13, in Fort Worth, three press planes and Kennedy and Johnson’s two private Convairs arrived with a team of all stars including Gov. Daniel, Lt. Gov. Ben Ramsey and Kennedy’s sister Pat Lawford, wife of movie star Peter Lawford.

But for the candidate, the most important person in Fort Worth was a living reminder of his dead brother, Joe.

On Aug. 12, 1944, Lt. Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. and his Texan co-pilot, Lt. Wilford John Willy, flew a B-24 loaded with 21,170 pounds of Torpex, a high-yield explosive. Removing the safety pin from the payload, Joe Jr. transmitted the code “Spade flush,” his last known words. The two Navy flyers disintegrated along with their plane when the munitions detonated prematurely 2,000 feet above the English coast, damaging 59 buildings below in Suffolk.

Willy’s widow, Edna, still lived in the Fort Worth home she and her husband had purchased together. She had remained in touch with the Kennedy family and she was the first person Kennedy greeted when his feet touched the ground. At Burnett Park in downtown, Willy was ushered through the crowd of 15,000 and given the prized seat on the dais between Kennedy and Johnson.

The crowd that greeted JFK and LBJ in downtown Fort Worth was sparse compared to the rousing lunchtime welcome they would get in Dallas.

After the speeches, the cars pulled away on the Lamar Street side of the park with Texas’ first female district judge, Sarah T. Hughes, shoehorned between Kennedy and Johnson. (Three years later, Hughes would race from her home on Normandy Avenue in Highland Park to give the oath of office to LBJ at Love Field.)

With a narrow tie that matched his slim build, Barefoot Sanders sat in front. Later, he recalled Johnson’s impatience as the cars full of dignitaries headed for Arlington with a motorcycle escort. “[We were] kind of just moseying along and he started hollering at the policemen, ‘Let’s move, let’s move,’” Sanders said.

Near the Arlington State Bank, a crowd gathered around the candidates’ convertible and heard Kennedy joke, “I live just 3 miles from Arlington — in Massachusetts,” referring to the Boston suburb.

A campaign aide quietly murmured, “I wonder if we’re going to find there’s a Grand Prairie, Massachusetts, at the next stop.”

Nearly 6,000 people gathered in the parking lot of the Chance Vought Aircraft factory at the Dallas Naval Air Station.

Hats and handkerchiefs

The charismatic JFK rivaled his friend Frank Sinatra in the effect he often had on female admirers, a phenomenon that became apparent in downtown Grand Prairie when he was approached by a woman wearing a Kennedy-Johnson campaign ribbon.

“[She] kept crowding the car for Mr. Kennedy to give her a souvenir,” recalled Gen. Carl Phinney, Dallas co-chair of the campaign. She placed her hand in Kennedy’s jacket pocket and tried to take his handkerchief. Covering his pocket, Kennedy reached over and snatched the pocket square of an unaware LBJ.

Crossing the line into Dallas, LBJ noticed something missing. According to Phinney, “He reached up to fix his handkerchief and said, ‘Where in the hell is my handkerchief?’ And Kennedy said, ‘Well, I gave it to that woman back there at Grand Prairie.’”

It was not yet noon when their car pulled into the asphalt parking lot of the Chance Vought Aircraft factory at the Dallas Naval Air Station, but the late-summer sun was already punishing dignitaries and spectators alike. About 6,000 employees had assembled, held back from blocking the entrance by the factory’s security team in their trademark white cowboy hats.

“I remember everyone trying to get into this little parking lot,” recalled Chance Vought design engineer Dick Atkins. “Lyndon Johnson was standing up and the sweat was pouring off him. One of the photographers asked him to put his hat on and he gave the guy a dirty look. Kennedy didn’t seem like he was sweating at all.”

(Later, when the motorcade got bogged down in Dallas, Johnson staffer Liz Carpenter bolted into the A. Harris department store on Akard to buy a fresh shirt for LBJ. “She ran in and bought the shirt and came back in time to catch the motorcade again,” said Judge Hughes.)

Kennedy was habitually cautious and almost phobic about photos of him wearing regional garb like a Native American headdress. So when he was handed a cowboy hat as a gift at Chance Vought, he joked, “I gotta stay in Texas about three more days before I put that on.”

But the trip had been unexpectedly rejuvenating. “The hoarseness in his voice that had been bothering him miraculously disappeared,” recalled O’Donnell.

And feeling high-spirited, he stood on the trunk of the cherry red Ford holding the new hat and changed his mind. “I’m going to wear this in the St. Patrick’s Day parade in Boston,” he joked.

For almost two complete seconds, John F. Kennedy wore a cowboy hat in Dallas, while LBJ whooped and waved his own stingy-brim Resistol in exultation.

Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn before his fiery speech at Dallas’ Memorial Auditorium.

The Rayburn Conversion

If the Houston speech converted a few suspicious ministers, Main Street in downtown Dallas was Sam Rayburn’s road to Damascus.

As the motorcade approached the Western boundary of downtown, Rayburn sat low in the back seat of a convertible obscured by his trademark hat.

At 78, the House speaker had gone from Texas cotton farmer to integral thread in the national fabric. When FDR declared Dec. 7, 1941, “a date which will live in infamy,” Rayburn sat behind him. When Harry Truman was hastily sworn in as president, Rayburn stood with him.

Standing with JFK and Rayburn, liberal Texas Sen. Ralph Yarborough was allowed to smile but not speak.

But when Kennedy was in Congress, about the nicest thing Rayburn could say was “He’s a good boy.” Privately, he told friends, “Jack is one of the laziest men I ever talked to.”

And downtown Dallas was home turf to two institutions for which Rayburn had an unaffected contempt: Dallas’ right-wing millionaire establishment and the paper he viewed as its mouthpiece, The Dallas Morning News.

In 1957, when the speaker was invited to the Dallas Press Club’s Gridiron Dinner, he told an aide, “Wire them, ‘Kiss my ass,’ and sign my name.”

Yet, lowest of all in Rayburn’s esteem was Richard Nixon.

So Rayburn gamely followed Kennedy through the plaza named for Morning News founder G.B. Dealey and through the heart of the Dallas business district. He watched the crowd grow in size and enthusiasm until the spectators at Akard and Commerce brought the procession to a near stop.

LBJ motions for a path through the 175,000 spectators as the motorcade slows to a crawl at the Mobil Building.

JFK’s other Dallas parade

On that Tuesday, Dallas Police Chief Jesse Curry estimated 175,000 people had turned out for Kennedy’s festive motorcade.

The candidate’s open car moved eastbound with zero Secret Service protection under the benign gaze of the Texas School Book Depository. (On this day, Lee Harvey Oswald was a defector living in the Belarus capital, Minsk.)

At the intersection of Main and Market streets, the high-kicking Kilgore Rangerettes waited in white boots and red blouses to lead Kennedy, Johnson and a curiously anonymous marching band to the doors of Memorial Auditorium.

The parade officially begins at Main and Market streets after passing eastbound through Dealey Plaza.

Members of the Jesuit High School band “were very conscious that they might be charged with being Catholic,” explained Sanders, “so they took off their identification.”

At the right turn onto Akard, the candidates were met with a cloudburst of confetti that littered Kennedy’s thatch of chestnut hair and turned the sidewalk of the Mobil Building from battleship gray to paper white.

Propelled by Kennedy’s unfiltered star power, onlookers spilled into the street, many running up to touch the candidate or at least exchange greetings with Rayburn or Sen. Ralph Yarborough.

As cars crept to a near standstill under the windows of the Continental Airlines office, Lyndon Johnson waved his cowboy hat like a traffic cop, motioning for an open lane.

Just three cars back, Rayburn watched the mirth and the confetti with a mixture of incredulity and pleasure, blissfully unaware of the cancer that was stalking him. One year later, President Kennedy would return to Dallas aboard Air Force One to visit the dying speaker at Baylor Hospital. But on this day in 1960, the old lion still had his roar and he brought it out after the motorcade arrived at Memorial Auditorium.

“[Rayburn] made a great speech in Dallas, I’ll never forget it,” recalled O’Donnell. “He was talking about Democrats and about religion and these rich oil millionaires.”

“The people who were the worst broke and got the richest under Roosevelt and Truman hate us the worst,” Rayburn declared to the crowd of 9,500.

‘Well, we’re going to win’

Arriving at Love Field, Kennedy waved his new cowboy hat from the top stair as he boarded the Caroline. When the bald Speaker set down his hat and took his seat aboard the Kennedy plane, he was buoyant. “Well, we’re going to win,” he said. “I never believed it before. I thought we were just going through the motions.”

“Well, we’re going to win. I never believed it before. I thought we were just going through the motions.”

– Sam Rayburn, on Kennedy's chances of winning the election

But despite the enthusiasm for Kennedy on Main Street, Dallas County did not go for the millionaire with the matinee-idol smile. It wasn’t even close. In Dallas, Kennedy received only 38 percent of the popular vote.

Criswell and other critical clergymen “were effective, as it turned out,” Sanders said later. “The reason you could see they were effective was because we lost votes in Democratic [voting] boxes [and] the only reason for that was Catholic. You don’t argue people out of this emotional reaction, as we found out.”

And you don’t change rich conservatives into Democrats with handshakes and a smile. Kennedy had given plenty of both near his family’s beachfront estate in Hyannis Port.

The president-elect probably never examined his showing in Dallas County against the returns in Barnstable County, Mass., home of the famous Kennedy Compound.

When his closest neighbors on Cape Cod went to the polls, just 38 percent of them voted for John F. Kennedy.

A note on sources

For the narrative on JFK’s Forgotten Dallas Motorcade, staff writer Alan Peppard based his reporting on interviews with Dick Atkins, retired Chance Vought engineer; Dee J. Kelly, an assistant to Sam Rayburn; and Louise Caldwell, daughter of Gen. Carl Phinney. He also used these sources:

Archive, The Dallas Morning News

Archive, The Dallas Times Herald

Man of the House: The Life and Political Memoirs of Speaker Tip O’Neill, Tip O’Neill with William Novak, 1987